This week’s quality tip will help you to ensure your agency is accurately reporting the height of falls. As you can see in Figure 1 below, falls represent a disproportionately high number of patients entered into the state trauma registry. The “height of fall” element was added to the EMS dataset because it is a vital measure to separate minor injuries from potential or actual major trauma.

Knowing the height of falls significantly contributes to our ability use fall data and contributes to public health, injury prevention, and safety efforts and help to know where to concentrate their resources and efforts to prevent them in the future. At the agency level it helps when performing QA to separate common injuries from responses that meet trauma triage criteria.

Ground level falls should be reported as zero (0) feet. Any reported falls that to do not have any height of fall (are blank) listed or have an unusually high number of feet are examples of probable errors that could be corrected or prevented in the future by educating your providers. Figure 2 below shows responses where the height of the fall and crew member info is missing.

Please take a minute to check your agency’s compliance with reporting the “height of fall” by signing into VPHIB, go to Report Writer 2 (now under the more tab), open the “audit folder,” and scroll down to the Height of Fall QA report. Click on generate report and select your agency name and you will see all falls for the last six months.